by Rhys Ford
I gritted my teeth against the inevitable, grabbed the captain’s chair by its arms, and hefted it up over my head. The black paint she used to refinish the metal did little to shield me from its poisonous bite. I didn’t know what they made the old tables out of, but they were a hell of a lot more dangerous than anything I’d run across. My skin burned where I touched it, and the strength in my legs wavered as my muscles rebelled from the proximity of the metal.
“Get out of the way!” I shouted at Ryder. Then I took the stairs as quickly as I could and hoped I wouldn’t collapse or puke on the way. My stomach was threatening to starfish out of my mouth, but I swallowed and held it back. It wasn’t hard to figure out the moment Ryder came too close to the chair, because his face flushed green, his jaw clenched, and his neck muscles bulged out against the strain.
I was the most magical elfin thing I knew of, and these chairs made me sick as a dog after a three-day binge on a garbage scow.
The shielding spell had no chance.
I was used to hefting up large objects and struggled with more than my fair share of unwieldy, monstrous bodies, but I rarely handled eighty pounds of poison. Its presence against my skin and bones weakened me and stole the strength from my muscles. My upper arms shook with my struggle to hold on, and then my back nearly folded over, unable to support the weight I was swinging about.
“Kai, what are you doing?” Ryder recoiled and staggered away when I swept the chair back. “We won’t be able to—”
I was still hurting from the battle Jonas and I had fought with the cuttlefish. It was mostly bruises, but the proximity to that much iron had me feeling every bit of torn muscle and mangled flesh beneath my skin. The waves of pain sickened me nearly as much as the presence of the metal, but I wanted to get inside. I needed to find Duffy and rescue her from whoever and whatever had sealed her into those spells.
My shoulders wrenched as I twisted about, and there was too little space on the wraparound porch to get momentum, but I couldn’t risk what I planned on doing from the lawn. The craftsman’s porch was lined with wide posts and thick solid short walls—perfect for lounging on but impossible to throw things through.
I got in as many revolutions I could, spinning in place to build up centrifugal force. Then, just as a wave of sickness hit me, I let go of the heavy chair and prayed to Pele.
The flung wrought-iron behemoth hit the spell with a sizzling crunch, and the world broke apart.
Ryder caught me in midspin before I fell off the porch, and we were both flung away from the house by the explosion. Smoke billowed out of Duffy’s house, and flaming sparks and ash formed a storm of dancing devils when the shield collapsed. I couldn’t tell if the dampening enchantment disintegrated when the obfuscation broke, because the black dust that billowed through the air made it impossible to see. My eyes stung from the acrid smoke, turning everything blurry, but I could see well enough to find the house, or what remained of it.
The upper story was engulfed in flames, and the roof was collapsing in on the right, above the dining room. The lower level looked gutted, but the left side of the house was still mostly intact. Despite my palms being raw and blistered from the iron, I broke free of Ryder’s hold and headed in.
He tried to keep me there, attempted to drag me back down to the ground by grabbing at my shirt and jacket. But strength surged through my thighs, and I twisted loose and easily evaded his second attempt. The porch was beginning to crackle, but the back door was unlocked, though the knob burned my already-injured hand and seared the flesh closed on the blisters I’d gotten from the iron chair. I didn’t have time to deal with the pain. My sole focus was Duffy and my hope that she was alive somewhere in the inferno that had been hidden by Unsidhe magic.
The back door opened up into the kitchen, and there was little left of the counters I’d helped put in. If it was difficult to see outside, inside was a soup of flames and soot. Inhaling ash set my lungs on fire, but I pushed on and headed toward the front rooms. She would’ve wanted to serve Ryder in the formal setting of the rarely used parlor that she’d taken forever and a day to design.
That’s where I found her, exactly as I imagined.
Except for the gaping hole that stretched down her chest and belly.
My heart felt as though it’d been punched through, and I fell to my knees, gathered her up, and looked for any sign of life in her open, sightless eyes. Her fingers were curled in, her nails painted her favorite scarlet red. I scooped her up and tried to stagger through the house, but the walls seemed to move, and I kept banging them and jostling us despite my very best effort to get us free.
“Kai!” Ryder’s voice echoed through the smoke. “Where are you?”
His voice was enough to lead me at least a few feet, and then strong hands grabbed my arms and turned me around. I was in a hallway I’d been down countless times before, but confusion settled in on my thoughts and masked my sense of direction. Something insidious whispered in my brain, then again around my head, and wrapped around me as tightly as a vine strangling a tree to death.
“The obfuscation enchantment is still going. You only weakened it.” Ryder hooked his arm into mine, loosening my hold on Duffy. “I’m going to try to lead us out, but if you see the door, pull us that way so I can follow.”
He said nothing about me holding her, but I saw his gaze slide away from her still body.
A sliver of light became our guide, although it seemed as though it moved every time we got close. The whispering continued. It wove through my thoughts, and I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. Ryder was practically holding me when we burst out of the back door, engulfed in fumes and smoke. I stumbled on the stairs, cradling Duffy to me, and I fell and hit the stone walkway that cut through the lawn.
“You’re too close to the house.” Ryder pulled at my arm, trying to get me to my feet. “You’ve taken in too much smoke. I’ve got to get you to fresher air, Kai.”
“Not leaving her,” I growled back as I scooped Duffy up once more. I was on my knees, and my legs refused to straighten, but I wasn’t going to let her go. I couldn’t. A harsh tickle started in my belly, worked its way up through my lungs and throat, and I began to spasm and cough uncontrollably. Still I held on.
Ryder lifted me up, wrapped his arms around my waist, and yanked me to my feet. He struggled to drag me away from the house to put distance between us and the now-raging fire. Sirens were going off above us, triggering a focused water dump on the area, but the flames were too fierce and turned the deluge into banks of rolling hot steam.
Ryder got us as far as the garage before he collapsed into a coughing fit. I joined him. My lungs seized up inside of my chest, and I spat out what came up—a sticky black mass splattered on the concrete floor of the garage. My eyes were still stinging, and my hands were cracked and singed across my abused palms, but the pain was something I was going to have to live with because Duffy lay broken on the floor next to me.
Her long brown hair was missing on one side of her skull, but so was the skin it was once attached to. Her mouth was a mimicry of a grin, and where the intense heat of the fire had peeled her lips back from her teeth, a splash of scarlet lipstick remained to match her fingernails. Her eyes were swollen and bruised, and she stared up at the ceiling.
I got to my knees, slid my arm under her shoulders, and lifted her up from the cold floor, hoping to find some sense of life in her stillness. But as much as I wanted to ignore them, the gaping wounds in her torso were too real, too permanent.
“This can’t be happening,” I cried out, my voice scalded into a tortured croak. “Not Duffy. Not like this.”
I could still feel the endless labyrinth of words woven around the house, and the power in them haunted me. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t as though I didn’t know that life wasn’t ever fair, but Duffy didn’t deserve the end that came for her. No one should die for trying to keep others safe. And even if I hadn’t known all of her secrets, she entrusted me to take care of he
r legacy because it grew too big for her, and now it had gotten her killed.
“There’s got to be something I can do. She can’t be dead.” I held her lifeless body, but I’d held her countless times before, and I’d always felt the beat of her heart against my arm or my cheek when I laid my head on her chest or felt her pulse when I pressed my lips to her long, elegant throat. “I can’t let you go like this. You can’t leave me like this.”
Something dark flared inside of me, and its sickening call seduced me and drew me in. The whispers plaguing my thoughts became clear, familiar words that I’d never spoken but somehow knew the meaning of. Death seemed so useless, so ridiculous, and something easily overcome with a bit of power I didn’t possess. I needed a way to undo the damage done to her, to peel back the death wrapped through Duffy’s existence and expose her fragile body to the life around her.
I so badly wanted her to breathe. I ached to feel her heart beat again, and I couldn’t imagine a world where I didn’t hear her laughter when I showed up on her doorstep holding a box of chocolate cupcakes I’d gotten from her favorite bakery. I wasn’t going to live without a New Year’s kiss from her every time the calendar turned over, and I refused to live a life without her gentle flirtations, even though we stopped sleeping together years before.
There was no way I was going to fucking live like that. I wasn’t going to live without her. The darkness in me grew and spread through my chest until it strangled my senses and confused my thoughts. I couldn’t see a way out of the sticky veil that covered my sight. But then I felt death itself in Duffy’s body, and her limbs stiffened as I held her tight. Where sorrow and denial once reigned, my rage was born, kicking and screaming against the futility of fragile flesh and waning souls.
The whispering returned, but this time the words were different, focused on the rebuilding of flesh instead of fire. I had to close the hole in her chest. She wouldn’t be able to survive unless her lungs could expand and her heart beat beneath her now-shattered ribs. Her flesh had to be whole, and shaping her flesh, an impossible task only moments before, seemed so simple once I listened to the threads of sound that echoed through the crackle of the raging fire.
Something in me broke open, and the pain that filled my body gushed forward and carried the darkness out.
Duffy blinked.
Something had changed. There was a spark of life in her, something I’d missed or simply hadn’t seen because I was so overwrought. But she blinked.
Then her heart beat. It was sluggish, but it was there—a tiny hiccup of blood movement at her throat—and I looked up, unable to trust my own senses.
“Ryder, she’s alive. We have to get healers,” I begged him through my tears, trying to blink away the soot that clung to my lashes. “Or get her to Medical. They can save her.”
I didn’t understand the pity in Ryder’s expression or how slowly he was moving, and I couldn’t seem to shake the spell we’d gone through on the porch. But its lingering effects didn’t matter, not when I could feel Duffy moving in my arms. The nausea was back, and my guts cramped as they responded to something malevolent moving through me. Duffy shifted and then blinked again, but this time I noticed the brilliant blue of her eyes was fading, slowly changing to a milky white.
I glanced back to look at Ryder, unable to make sense of what was going on, and Duffy’s head turned as well. Her charred hair slithered down my arm when she tilted back, and my vision wavered as I caught a flash of my own face, a hard sculpt of Sidhe features with a wealth of black-purple hair I could only have gotten from my Dusk Court blood. I’d only ever seen myself in a mirror or reflected back in water, but before I could focus, I blinked, and the vision was gone.
“Kai, you’ve got to let her go.” Ryder slowly approached me, nearly crawling to get to my side. He was as filthy as I was but still as perfect as he’d been the moment I first saw him. The filth and trauma of what we’d gone through hadn’t dimmed his natural beauty, and despite the ash smeared over his face, his gentle smile was a comfort. “Listen to me. You don’t want to do this. This isn’t you. The spell is doing something, and I don’t know what exactly, but it’s calling to your father’s power. I need you to hear me, Kai. Duffy is gone.”
“You’re wrong. I can feel her heart beat,” I argued, but it was difficult to think with the sick moving through my belly and clouds forming in my brain. It was getting harder to think—to focus—but Ryder gripped my chin in his hand and forced me to look at him.
“Listen very carefully to her heart, Kai. Does it beat in time with yours?” Ryder kept a firm hold on me, refusing to let me go, keeping my gaze on him. “Do you not see how she moves with you?”
“The iron from the chair.” I gasped as I fell into another coughing fit. I couldn’t seem to catch my breath, and as my chest worked to pull in air, Duffy’s rose and fell in staggered jerks.
My hands ached, much like my back had for ages when I’d been in my father’s possession—when I’d been my father’s possession. It’d been so long since I’d been used in his enchantments, since the iron in my flesh served as a focus for his foul magics. Parts of him still lingered in me—arcane traps I would never break free of—and something in the spells surrounding the house, combined with the poisonous metal flakes I’d probably driven into my skin, awakened the Unsidhe horrors lying dormant in me.
The reality of death consuming the woman I held in my arms had stolen my sanity away. I wanted nothing more than to see Duffy rise from the black pit she’d been thrown into. My father’s necromancy could resurrect the shell that once carried her soul, but it would never bring back the woman and her sultry laughter. I knew that, but I still couldn’t let go.
“Would you want this for her? Would you want her to live as your puppet?” Ryder’s words were gentle, but they abraded my already-raw heart. “I don’t think so, Kai. You would want her to have peace, not this soulless existence as your plaything.”
It took everything I had inside me, but I slid Duffy’s body into Ryder’s arms and then broke away, leaving me with only my grief to hold.
Nine
THERE WASN’T enough whiskey in the world.
Ironically the cops we’d seen on the road were the ones who responded to the call Duffy’s neighbor made when the obfuscation spell broke. The tall baldheaded one turned out to be a former Stalker who’d left the Post’s service with a chip on his shoulder and a perforated intestine. He knew who I was as soon as he rolled onto the scene and got out of his car. He called out my name in a questioning tone while his hand rested on his gun holster.
He wasn’t adversarial, but Ryder’s diplomatic immunity went a long way in getting us handled with kid gloves, especially once the Non-Mundane Crimes unit hit the scene. The human wizards poured over the site and got in the way of the firemen responding to the call. And once they cornered Ryder and me against my truck, I knew we were in it for the long haul.
I checked out. Ryder fielded most of the questions and then stepped in to answer everything they threw at us once I caught myself staring at a boggle-eyed human dressed in purple robes embroidered with metallic gold symbols. The sigils he wore on his clothes were familiar, but I couldn’t place them—at least not until I realized they were a string of the elfin alphabet I’d seen painted on the nieces’ bedroom walls.
At that point I just wanted out. I hated bureaucracy and its red tape. Nothing I said or did was going to bring Duffy back, and from the looks of things, the Dusk Court was responsible for her death. There was no way in any of the hells that the SoCal government or San Diego’s police department would bring down her killers. That was the worst part about the Merge—the glaring fractures in law enforcement and justice. Even if an Unsidhe lord walked out of the engulfed house and claimed responsibility, there was nothing any of us could do.
Well, I could put a bullet in his head, but that wouldn’t change anything. It would make me feel better, but it wouldn’t change anything.
Freed by the cops with
a warning to make myself available for any future questions, I handed Ryder the keys to the truck and let him drive us back to my place. There were lingering cobwebs in my mind, and the numbness creeping through my body refused to be dislodged.
I didn’t remember the ride home, but Ryder eventually got us there. A few minutes later, after I fought with the front door, I plopped myself down on the couch and wondered if I shouldn’t have thrown up in the kitchen sink first. Newt came over to chew on my nose and then screamed his fool head off when Ryder walked into the warehouse and closed the door behind him.
“Does he need to be fed?” He headed to the kitchen—the one with the sink I should have used—and opened up the cabinet where I kept my booze. The bottle he pulled out would’ve been my first choice if I’d made it over there, and for the first time in my life, I was thankful Ryder paid attention to what I drank. “You give him a full can of food, right?”
“He’s lying to you. I fed him before we left. He just likes screaming at people.” I scratched at my cat’s ears and folded them back from his face. He seemed to like it, just like he enjoyed getting the spot next to his tail scratched and me rubbing my thumbs between the toe pads on his back feet. A bit of drool formed on Newt’s lips, and his eyes rolled back and showed their whites. His purrs were loud and uneven, a rumbling glitch that would have sent me to check the timing on my engine if he’d been a car.
I never understood the lure of the single place to live until I bought the warehouse and molded it into where I wanted to spend time. Everything there was something familiar and permanent I’d pulled through the door and set in place. Even the cat was a set fixture, a companion of sorts for the nights when I lay in my own bed instead of crashing on an air mattress in the back of my truck. Don’t get me wrong. I loved to go on runs. I loved the hunt, but I loved having a home—someplace I could lick my wounds and heal.